


Song of the Sandhills

by the_parallax_of_rain



Category: Better Call Saul (TV)
Genre: F/M, Music, Pre-Canon, Red Cloud, ch 1 is a straight-up love letter to young kim and red cloud and i'm not even sorry
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-04
Packaged: 2021-03-14 14:21:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28547025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_parallax_of_rain/pseuds/the_parallax_of_rain
Summary: Every spring, the warm wind would sweep along the banks of the Republican River, heralding the arrival of the sandhill cranes. As a child, Kim had gone down to the river with her mom to watch them fly by each year, webbed feet dragging across the surface of the water, black-tipped wings extended gracefully as they landed in the mud to forage for a few days, gathering strength to continue their journey upwards to central Nebraska then all the way up north to the arctic.One year, the cranes came late.
Relationships: Jimmy McGill | Saul Goodman/Kim Wexler
Comments: 10
Kudos: 14





	Song of the Sandhills

**Author's Note:**

> While working on the next chapter of Invincible (which is...coming along!), I found myself putting in some musical stuff that didn’t quite fit. And also, ever since we saw Kim with her cello in 5x06 I’ve been thinking about how a lot of characters play some type of instrument (Kim, Chuck, Rebecca, Jimmy to a certain extent…), so here is my attempt at exploring the pre-canon years with a slight musical twist! This fic is very self-indulgent, meaning lots of music, lots of birds, lots of Kim, lots of me revealing my obsession with Red Cloud, oops.
> 
> I may have spent over 3 months writing just this first chapter 💀 so if you have any feedback at all I would really really appreciate it ❤️

“I’ll never get it right.” 

“Don’t worry, it’s just practice anyway. Let’s hear it again, kiddo.” 

Dipping her head to avoid her dad’s gaze, Kim straightened up, adjusted her fingering on the neck of her cello, and carefully set her bow against the strings again. The horsehair caught slightly against the metal, and she pulled through the friction, drawing out the first measure of _Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14._ From the microtremors of the strings came a harsh creaking that slowly faded out once she released some pressure on the bow - the main melody unfurled in tenuous threads, restrained and quiet. 

Once Kim finished the entire six-minute long piece, she let her bow fall off to the side, glancing down at the white slash of rosin left across her knee. The resonating hum of the cello faded quickly in the cool air.

She thumbed at the corner of the sheet music, before gathering up the pages and stuffing them back into the binder. The rustling of paper broke through the thick silence.

And her dad seemed to sense her discomfort. He pushed off from the table where he had been leaning, and straightened his glasses. “I don’t know what you’re worried about, Kim. That was beautiful! I’m sure you’d make Rachmaninoff himself proud.” 

She threw him a pointed look, braid thumping against her shoulder as she turned her head. “No, he wouldn’t be proud. I can play the notes and the dynamics but it still doesn’t feel right.” 

He drew his mouth into a thin line, contemplating her words. “Well, _I’m_ proud of you, anyways.” Then he leaned over to pat her shoulder. “I believe in you, kiddo. You can do this! Those other orchestra kids won’t know what hit them.”

Kim ran a hand over the scroll of her cello, the wood feeling cool and grainy under her fingertips, before she laid the instrument down on its side. She remembered the moment she had first laid eyes upon it – a chilly February evening, the stars outside as bright as birthday candles. Her dad had ambushed her with the cello, a warm grin on his face as she brought the instrument to life, plucking nonsensical melodies with her small fingers.

It wasn’t so much a gift as an investment, but Kim couldn’t complain. It was the only real luxury item she owned. And nobody else had really felt the need to invest in her - not her relatives living across the state, not her underpaid teachers in school, and certainly not her mom. There had only been her dad, urging her on as she performed a jingle bell solo at the Ding Dong Playschool’s winter concert, eventually moving on to larger string instruments until she finally made her way to the Red Cloud Elementary School Orchestra as principal cellist. A tenuous position to hold, given that her stand partner was actually able to afford private music lessons up in Omaha. _I’m gonna be first chair someday,_ he had threatened. _You just watch out, Kim._

She leaned down and tucked her cello into its case briskly. She welcomed challenges anyway.

Her dad had already moved on to a different topic of conversation. “So, what do you feel up to this weekend? Knock ‘Em Over is doing a discount, last I checked.” 

_Not again._ She groaned. “Dad, you _suck_ at bowling. It’s not fair that I beat you every time.” 

“Okay, I see,” her dad replied, looking amused. “You don’t want to win easy, do you?” And at her lack of response, his face crumpled into laughter. “Well, then, how about a movie? We could go up to the Sky View, see if they’re putting on _To Kill A Mockingbird_ again? Or maybe _Ice Station Zebra_. What do you think?” 

She bit her lip. “You won’t be busy grading homework and doing other teacher stuff?” 

“I will always make time for you, kiddo,” her dad smiled, the weight of his hand warm against her shoulder. Kim tried to return his smile, but there was a sour taste on her tongue as she realized this was it, this was it until the weekend.

Then he seemed to notice the darkness shadowing her face. He leaned down, concerned. “What’s wrong?”

And now was her chance, wasn’t it? “Nothing, I was – I was just thinking. Could I stay here tonight?”

He sighed. “Kim, we talked about this. I have to get you back home, okay? Your mom’s probably got dinner waiting for you.” 

“I know, but I was thinking, I don’t even come here that much, and you’re always busy with teaching…and half the time I’m just practicing so we don’t even talk – ” 

“Well, Kim, you don’t have to play only here, you know? You could play at home, I’m sure your mom would love to hear what you’ve been practicing."

“I don’t think she would like it.”

“What?” Her dad raised an eyebrow, looking comically affronted. “That is a _crime.”_

Kim thought of her cello, a convergence of rosin-crusted strings and dull wood that was currently lying lifeless against the floorboards. An instrument she tried to make more than just the sum of its parts. “She said, um, that it’s a waste of money and time.”

“Oh sweetheart.” He crouched down until they were eye-level, resting both hands on her shoulders. “Don’t believe what she says, okay? Anyway, _I_ got you the cello, so I get the final word on all things music-related.”

Kim remained quiet as he bundled her up for the trip back into town, and thirty minutes later, they pulled up in front of that small house with the frowning windows and the cracked door through which he wasn’t welcome to enter. “I’ll see you on Saturday, okay?” he said, adjusting Kim’s collar slightly to keep her warm against the wind.

“Okay. Thanks, Dad.”

He hesitated for a brief moment before letting her go.

The next day during rehearsal, her section kept on fumbling over their section of the Mozart piece they were preparing for the spring concert, causing the entire orchestra to stop and start again and again. As their teacher began chewing out the rest of the cellists, Kim found herself staring at the ending of the piece. Over the last note was a fermata, a grim half-circle folded over a black dot, as if the music itself was staring back at her, daring her to play through the silence. And then a repeat sign, a colon followed by two vertical slashes downward at the very end, marking a return back to the beginning.

All she could think about was her dad’s parting words the day before, called after her as she turned to walk up the front steps. “I mean it, Kim. Someday you’re gonna get out of this town and go on to do bigger and better things. We’re all gonna get out. Just imagine, no more circling the drain in Red Cloud anymore!” 

At the drop of the baton, she looped through the song one more time, then again, until the melodies became irreversibly intertwined, until she couldn’t tell start from end. 

The years since then have gone by the same way - autumn twisting into winter then folding gently into spring. The passage of time was bookended by the soft hissing of snow over the hushed landscape, and the call of the meadowlarks swirling through the golden fields and across the flat gray highway.

If she looks outside, she can still imagine the switchgrass outside her dad’s place, rising up to brush the windowsill, sunlight gleaming around the tips until they’re frost-white.

That same sunlight now falls across her crippled music stand, bristling claw-like from the floor.

She kneels on the hardwood, and glances down at the old music binder lying before her. She runs her finger across her old sheet music, where her dad had written “KIM” in obnoxiously big bubble lettering, coloring in the K with blue highlighter and following with green and orange for the rest. An easy way to entertain a ten-year-old frustrated with all the mistakes she had made during practice that day. 

She glances over at the cello leaning against the wall, lightly brushed with several years’ worth of accumulated dust. On the floor lies the cello case, a “Red Cloud High School” sticker plastered near the zipper. 

Tomorrow she turns eighteen, and she will celebrate alone. 

* * *

The closure of State Theater had been the final step in the slow extinction of Red Cloud’s art scene. At least, that’s what Kim’s dad had told her when they passed by the empty husk of a building that had once been filled with golden audiences and opera performances. 

“One day, this place is gonna reopen, kiddo. And if we’re still in town when it happens, we’ll be able to hear them sing,” he had said, a comforting hand on her shoulder as he pulled her back into the streets. Kim threw another glance at the forlorn building, cobwebs swinging like shoelaces over the tarnished plaque bearing its name. 

As a child, Kim had spent hours lying awake each night, watching the fluid light from the streetlamps outside swell over the walls, listening to the arguments play out from the next room over - shouts woven seamlessly into the symphony of her childhood. Her parents’ separation had been a long time in the making. Chloe Wexler was young and insecure and went up in flames at the slightest hint of provocation, while Samuel Wexler retreated inside himself and whisked away her concerns like lingering fog. She came to town with a drinking problem, and he devoted his savior complex entirely to the students at Red Cloud High. Neither could find a way out of this mess together.

Kim spent her sixth birthday sitting in a courtroom, meticulously drawing on a legal pad with crayons the clerk had finagled from her own kids. Along the length of the yellow paper, she drew a T, and sketched out triangles at either end, glancing up every now and then at the scales of justice sitting atop the judge’s bench as her mom argued for custody in the background.

And so she began a childhood of half-lives. She switched between living with her mom and occasionally visiting the neighboring town Blue Hill, where her dad had found a cheap apartment and purchased a sputtering gray car to take him to and from work at Red Cloud High. Over the next few years, she began bringing her cello along, and her repertoire grew steadily with his encouragement. Schubert and Beethoven and Mozart. Sometimes he would bring her to school, and she would sit at his desk, staring at the large painted globe sitting atop a stack of history textbooks, as he taught his classes.

She lost count of the number of times he’d taken her to the local bowling alley after he finished teaching for the day, somehow always getting her discounted games and buy-one-get-one-free soft drinks. She learned how to bowl without slipping on the waxed floors, using both arms to swing thirteen-pound balls down the lane while her dad tossed his down the gutter. It was the scoliosis, he joked, that made his throws consistently poor. 

But then each time, she had to return to Red Cloud. And Kim learned to balance these few luxuries with all the times her mother pulled her out of bed and thrust boxes full of their belongings into her hands. Kim had been too young then to know what _evictions_ were. She had just stood outside knee-deep in snow, stockings soaking in the cold, as her mom spat some choice words at the landlord. They went everywhere - from the cramped one-room apartments above the grocery store to the basement of a rickety house with chipped paint and crumbling foundations to the Green Acres Motel at the edge of town priced at $17 per night. And wherever they moved, the rent would eat away at their savings, and soon afterward they’d be out in the streets again, hunting down a new part of town. 

Kim convinced herself it was better for everyone if she traveled light. With each move, her list of possessions grew smaller and smaller, until virtually all she had left was a cello, a boxful of clothes, and a throbbing emptiness inside her. And each time she saw the light fade a little more from her dad’s eyes, as he watched them barely hang on.

Over the years, Chloe Wexler increasingly spent her nights at the town bar. Early one morning, Kim woke up to the stinging smell of alcohol, coming off her mom’s clothes in sluggish waves. “It all makes sense, Kimmy. Why this whole thing got so fucked up.” She leaned against the wall, fingers knotted through her hair, her groan deep and long and blue. “I tried getting sober for him and what was the point? What even was the point?” And then Chloe lurched forward and seized Kim by the shoulders, eyes glinting dangerously. “We don’t need him anyways. We don’t _need him,_ Kim. We can live just fine without him.”

It takes considerable effort to rip a dollar bill in half. Kim observed this first-hand when her mom tore open the package left at their doorstep, dug out the bundle of money from within, and ripped the bills length-wise, one by one. She then dipped them into the blue flame of the stove. 

“Mom, stop!” Kim rushed over and gripped at Chloe’s sleeve. She watched the top half of Ben Franklin’s face blacken in the flames. “It’s illegal! You could get in trouble.” 

“So report me to the police, Kimmy,” Chloe snapped back. 

Kim tilted her head back as something burned behind her eyes. And she remembered the last thing her dad had said to her before he moved out to Blue Hill. His lip had trembled, almost imperceptibly, as he embraced her, whispering, “Listen, we’re gonna make this work, okay? Your mom and I…we both love you. But you have to take care of her, as best you can, okay?” 

And so Kim stood back and watched her dad’s money burn over the stove for years on end. 

* * *

“Back again so soon, darling?” the librarian asks, peering over at Kim from her round silver-rimmed glasses.

“What, sad to see me, Lynette?” Kim asks with a slight smile, as she heaves a staircase of books onto the counter. “I finally finished my college application. Think I’m ready to print and send it out.” 

Lynette shakes her head fondly, her curly white hair waving in the draft from the overhead fan. “Oh, honey, you are growing up so fast. I still remember the first day you came in here, asking if I could teach you how to type so you could use the computer lab.”

Kim chuckles at the memory. “Thank you so much for that, Lynette. It means a lot to me, your help.”

“Of course, of course. Oh, I’ll miss you when you go off to college. Even if you’ll still be in town, it won’t be the same.” And then, with some hesitation, she asks, “Is your mom doing alright? Haven’t seen her around recently.” 

“Yeah, I think she’s okay. I haven’t seen her in a while either, ever since I moved into my own place.” 

“Oh! Well, good for you!” Lynette opens up the first book and flips to the inside cover, where she annotates the due date. “I’ll have to catch up with Chloe later then. Oh, and any news about your father lately?” 

Kim stares down at the desk, at the watermarks marring the cherry wood with dark rings. “Uh. No, not exactly.”

She can feel the sympathy radiating from the librarian, and she shifts to shield herself from it. “Still no word from him, but I mean, I’m used to it.” 

“It’s a shame, what happened to him,” Lynette says gently, moving onto the next book. “You could visit him, you know. I’m sure he misses you.” 

Whether by accident or on purpose, Kim bites down on her cheek, and the lime-sharp pain keeps her tethered to the present. “Yeah. I’ll think about it.” 

She had stopped spending so much time with her dad after a while. Each time she made the trip to Blue Hill, was time that she couldn’t spend doing homework, or picking up extra cash from her new gig supervising the kids at the playschool.

The last evening Kim had spent with her dad, he had asked if she wanted to drive up to see the sandhills with him - a rolling stretch of land across northern Nebraska where the grass grew against all odds, where you could sink your feet into the sandy dirt and witness the early evening sun tracing the undisturbed dunes with gentle golds and oranges. “We’ll make a day trip out of it! What do you say?” he asked. 

But Kim had been tired from school and work, and the drive up there would have taken an entire day that she couldn’t afford to lose. So she shifted her activities around to land directly on the weekend that he had proposed for the outing, and she had told him, “I’m sorry, Dad, I can’t go but could you please bring back me some photos for me?”

She never received them. And the following week, after reading the front page headlines ( _Local high school teacher arrested, charged in vehicular homicide case_ ) she realized that he had never even made it to the sandhills after all. 

And of course, in a town as small as Red Cloud, everyone had been talking about the incident. On her way to school, someone she didn’t know had stopped her and asked if she planned to testify in the trial. The word _trial_ clawed its way into her chest, leaving her trembling in the cold dawn. 

Kim could only watch as the judge sentenced her father to ten years and a $5000 fine. It was a bargain, really, the public defender assured her. They’d gotten him the best deal possible. But because her dad had panicked and fled the scene at the time, they had tried the case as a hit-and-run, and jail time was unavoidable. Not to mention that the victim had been a wealthy tourist whose family had vowed to “prosecute Mr. Wexler to kingdom come”. 

_Just bad luck all around,_ the public defender said apologetically, as she watched him pack up his briefcase. _I’m sorry I couldn’t do more._ Sometime later that afternoon, Kim had ended up in the courthouse restroom, slumped in the corner with her head in her hands, listening to the steady drip of water from a broken sink. With each droplet that fell, her dad ended up further and further away from her. 

They had shipped him all the way up to the Omaha Correctional Center. As far as Kim knew, he would still have access to a phone there. And so she waited for the call to come, waiting for the shrill ring that would connect them over miles and miles of lonely prairie. So she could tell him that nothing had changed, that she was doing well in junior high and couldn’t wait for him to come back, and that she was sorry for not going with him that weekend. 

Her mom had scoffed at her persistence. “We don’t need him, Kimmy. We’ve been doing it on our own for years now. Stop waiting.”

Time slipped by without Kim realizing, and she entered high school alone. During her freshman year, she traded her afterschool orchestra rehearsals twice a week for extra shifts down at Casey’s, the general store less than a block down the street. The manager had been a close friend of her dad’s, so she figured that her being hired was more out of sympathy than anything else. Regardless, it was extra spending money for her and her mom, and if she sometimes had to endure a smattering of lewd comments from the farmer who dropped by every other week for a healthy dose of cigarettes and beer, then so be it. 

Auld Public Library was the only place in town where she felt safe from her restlessness. Kim returned there every now and then to fish for books to read, the ceiling fans keeping her cool through stifling summer days. She made her way down to the basement, where the Ding Dong Playschool was set up, to watch the kids make lopsided towers with colored blocks and challenge each other to jump-roping contests. She had been in their place once, happily babbling along to nursery rhymes sung by their teacher, drawing little ducks and cows with her friends using chewed-down colored pencils, and running into her parents’ arms at the end of the day, knowing she was loved.

Now she just listened intently to the snapping of ropes against the linoleum floor and watched the children’s bright towers topple over, trying not to sink too deeply into the emptiness within her chest.

She had dared to hope once. But she quickly learned that hope had no place in Red Cloud - the town beat it out of her, reached right in between her ribs and left a blackened scar that tightened as she grew. As a child, she had scraped her knee slipping over the railroad tracks, teetering right at the edge of town before she tripped over the iron rails and tumbled to the ground. Dirt and sand worked its way into her wound, and Kim wailed as the pain blossomed over her knee, hot and dark. Her parents rushed over, and she had been scooped up into her dad’s arms, and she screwed her eyes shut against the blinding sunlight as the three of them hobbled back towards their car, both her mom and dad attempting to console her.

But Red Cloud continued to hurt, and Kim had been inconsolable ever since she first realized that there was a world beyond its confines, beyond those gleaming tracks – a world waiting for her, breathless. 

* * *

The heat went out one blustery morning in November. Shivering, Kim made her way to the kitchen where her mom was sitting at the table, head in her hands. “Mom, what’s going on?” 

“It’s fine, it’s only temporary.” Chloe Wexler lurched upwards and grabbed the empty mug resting on the table beside her. “I’m gonna pay that son of a bitch next week and things will go back to normal.” 

Kim looked across the kitchen to the window, where through the frost-blurred glass she could see the power lines in the distance, glinting against the weak morning sky.

“Mom, I want to know how bad things really are. Just tell me the truth.” 

“I’m doing what I can, Kimmy,” Chloe Wexler said, tearing open the bag of expired instant coffee they had salvaged from the store yesterday. She scooped out a handful of the powder, then dumped it unceremoniously into her cracked mug. She filled the mug to the brim with hot water from the sink, stirring it half-heartedly with a spoon. 

“You think this water has lead in it?” she asked Kim, before shrugging. “Doesn’t matter. If I get sick, we can sue the county.” 

“Mom, come on, focus,” Kim said. “The situation - how bad is it? Please.” 

Her mom saluted her with her cup of coffee. “I’m _handling_ it, Kimmy.” She took a hearty sip, crunching the undissolved grounds between her teeth. “Like I said, I’m gonna pay him next week and it’ll all be just fine. I mean, he doesn’t even collect interest. You know, if you’re gonna ask for payments, you should really make sure there’s actually an _incentive_ to get them in on time…”

And Kim knew then that the conversation was headed absolutely nowhere.

Later that day, she brought up the subject again, while her mom was busy mulling over what to make for dinner – an entire box of frozen chicken nuggets or the bread rolls they had picked up from the grocery store’s “Expired Items” pile. It was so cold that her breath billowed out before her like ghosts.

This time, Chloe gave an answer. “Okay, you know what, there’s one thing you could do to help, actually. I’m sure we could sell your cello for – ”

“No.”

Chloe’s eyes narrowed. “Kim, you asked me to treat you like a grown-up, and that’s what I’m doing. I mean, what use is having a cello if we can’t even – let’s face it, since you want to acknowledge it so badly – if we’re barely getting by?”

“No, I can’t. It’s all – it’s – ” Kim sucks in a deep breath. “It’s all I have left.”

“All you have left _of what?_ I mean, outside of rehearsals do you even play the damn thing? I bet you don’t even like playing it.” 

“I like it better than I like you,” Kim retorted, and it was such a childish outburst, but _something_ had to give. 

Her mom became stiff, frozen like the hands of a dead clock. “Don’t you talk to me like that, Kim.” And something inside her snapped then, as she barreled on. “You think I haven’t been doing enough? You can’t see the board in class – I spend a fortune getting you contacts which, you know, weren’t cheap. You need to get picked up from your midnight orchestra rehearsals – I’m there for you. You lose your jacket at school – I buy you another one from the fucking Outlet all the way out in _Omaha_.”

“Mom, that jacket was, like, this ugly neon yellow-green, I – ”

“And it was _on sale,_ so what’s your point?”

“Okay, okay, but if you could just…” Kim’s heart was racing, and there was hot pressure building up at the corners of her eyes. “Mom, I want to help but I can’t do it if you keep telling me to throw away the only thing I still have that reminds me of – ”

And then her mom twisted around like the lip of a flame, and snatched up one of the bottles on the countertop next to her. She flung it at Kim but missed – it shattered against the wall. Kim flinched as glass shards sprayed over her head. “If you’re going to be sentimental about it, then why don’t you just go out and perform in the streets! See how much you can earn that way!”

And the thing that Kim had been suppressing for so long flared up – maybe anger, maybe fear. It spasmed like a dying bird trapped in her chest – and maybe it was mostly directed at herself, for continuing to chase the hope that things would one day go back to normal. 

She locked herself in her room for a few hours, staring down at the words and equations blurring together on her textbook, and by the time she entered the kitchen again her mom had fallen asleep on the couch. Kim glanced down at her slack face, at her curly blonde hair catching fire in the orange glow of the streetlamps through the window. 

It reminded her of the day she had come home from school to her mom passed out in the same position on the couch, barely breathing, a trail of vomit leading down to the floor where three empty bottles lay. She had panicked and rushed her mom over to the community hospital, where she sat crumpled in the waiting room for two hours as they treated her mom for alcohol poisoning. Her mom, who eventually woke up and ran her fingers through Kim’s hair, slurring, “It’s okay, baby, I’ll be okay” as Kim fought back angry tears.

And she knew that tomorrow morning, she would use the last of the pancake mix for breakfast, and her mom would approach her with a hangover in order to show Kim how to scoop out the apologies rotting in her mouth, how to brush off the bruises on her arm, how to flush out her split skin with warm lead-filled water. And they would both ignore the fact that their meager earnings kept disappearing at the same rate that new six-packs of beer appeared. Or that the water-wrinkled pages of last week’s newspaper still lay limp on the kitchen table, with each job listing crossed out violently as one by one, they rejected Chloe from consideration. It was always the same. 

She left to go retrieve a blanket from her room.

* * *

_Yeah, it’s all over the news, man. Mr. Wexler’s gone to jail! The teacher from Red Cloud High._

_Kim Wexler, the girl from orchestra. Yeah, that’s her, alone at that table. C’mon, dude, you didn’t know they were related?_

She closed her eyes, inhaling around the knot in her throat, as the bristling heat inside of her slowly slipped back into its endless reservoir. 

“Kim. Look at me and tell me what happened.” 

_He wasn’t even a good teacher. I mean, I heard his class didn’t even prepare you for the SATs, which is, like, what really matters, y’know?_

_Hey, Kimmy, how does it feel being related to a criminal? Someone who kept running away from his problems?_

_You gonna run away too, Kimmy?_

Three quick steps forward, a punch swinging out of left field, a bruise growing on her cheek, dirt on her palms and scrapes on her knuckles –

“Kim. You’re hyperventilating – just breathe slow for me, okay?”

She opened her eyes, and it was like she was back in the courtroom, pulse thundering in her ears as the judge read out the charges. She struggled to put a cap on her fury, which so frequently boiled at the edge of her tongue, red and unapologetic. 

She shuddered as the air flooded her lungs. The cuts on her hands were stinging. “They were saying some really shitty things, I - I had to end it.” 

Christine, the D.A.R.E. officer that had been assigned to Red Cloud Junior High, sighed. “Kim, you knocked out Leah’s tooth. Her mom has had to leave work so she can take her to the hospital.”

Kim swallowed and turned her head to the side. The crowd was beginning to disperse, but she could still see Leah lying on the ground, holding a tissue to her mouth. Even from a distance, Kim was able to glimpse the blood pooling in her palms, gleaming in the hot sun.

“Will I be suspended?” Kim asked, suddenly feeling small.

Christine gave her an unreadable look. The silence stretched for a few seconds more.

Then, Christine said, “You remember how we’ve been talking about anger management? How it’s not a good idea to leap head-first into situations without weighing the pros and cons, and it’s always better to walk away from people who are looking for a fight?” 

“Yeah,” Kim breathed, knowing what was coming next.

What came next was not what she expected. Thirty minutes later, she was sitting in a small café, folded neatly into the booth across from Christine. The officer had ordered some type of sandwich for Kim, along with a glass of milk. As Kim stared down at the food – her first real meal for the longest time – she heard Christine talking about _peer pressure_ and _stress,_ heard her saying “I know you’ve been facing some tough times at home, kid. This isn’t the answer, trust me.”

The sandwich had been toasted. It was a simple grilled cheese, and the heat was making the cheese cascade down the side of the bread onto the plate. It was clotting slowly into an orange puddle. Kim watched dully as Christine pulled the plate towards herself and cut the sandwich in half with a butter knife. 

“…they were just trying to – here you go, kid” – and she slid the plate back towards Kim – “they were trying to provoke you. And they were absolutely saying horrendous things, I know, but you can’t let it get to you, you hear me? You’re better than them, and you have to show them that. I know you’re grieving still, but there’s other ways – Kim? Are you listening to me?”

Something was shattering inside her, some fragile silence that had wrapped around her lungs, and suddenly she was gasping for air, like there were glass shards wedged in her chest. And that hot pressure was returning, collecting in her temples and at the corners of her eyes until it spilled forth as burning, crystalline tears. 

And all she could think about was the blood in Leah’s palms – so much blood for what seemed like a small wound. 

“Sorry, I don’t, I don’t know…” Kim sobbed – and her first thought was to cover her face with her hands in order to prevent tears and snot from getting all over the sandwich.

A steady hand gripped her shoulder. “Hey, hey. Things will be okay. Just breathe.” 

Two weeks later, when she returned from her suspension, the kids glanced at her nervously across the lunch tables. Leah’s eyes widened as she met Kim’s gaze. She still had bruises across her cheek, and her lip was swollen grotesquely. A navy-blue bandage with the D.A.R.E. logo was taped across her nose.

She thought about what she must have looked like to them, in her rumpled school uniform, braid swinging axe-like beneath her shoulders. Resentment hanging behind her like a drop shadow.

* * *

When Kim makes the short trek over to the Hinky Dinky for next week’s groceries, her last thirty dollars burning a hole in the pocket of her jacket, she brushes past all the red, white, and blue decorations. The same ones are hung each year; this time someone has even taken the liberty of draping them over the streetlights. And she’s reminded of the last Fourth of July celebration her parents had put together, in the few strangled weeks before their divorce was finalized. 

There had been a tornado that touched down near Red Cloud the year before. Kim remembered the sirens screaming once the gray funnel cloud was first spotted swirling into existence in the sickly green sky, and the crackling of the emergency radio in the basement as she huddled in her dad’s arms – static she could practically see. They had gone out to the fields afterwards to look at the damage. Even a year later, the bare earth torn up in its wake was still visible, emerging in a jagged scar that ran from beneath Kim’s shoes all the way up to the horizon. 

Kim listened intently as her dad told her all about the annual Fourth of July celebrations that used to sweep through the town like a fever. How all sorts of different vendors came from out of town to set up stands along Main Street, selling hot dogs and ice cream and newly invented glow sticks that the children cracked in their hands, watching the chemicals broil together, dappling the streets with luminous greens and oranges. How businesses around town, from the cheese company to the cigar manufacturers, sold their products for deep discounts. 

Kim turned to her mom, eyes wide, as Chloe accused, “And that’s the story of how your dad blew _all_ his money on discounted cheese. It makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it, Kimmy?”

“Hey, you know what?” Samuel challenged, putting up a defensive smile, as Kim laughed at the rare sight of her parents making jokes with each other. “The heart wants what it wants, okay?”

The evening dragged lazily on, the beginnings of stars starting to appear in the lavender-gray sky, poking through the thin layer of purple and orange clouds. 

“Tell her the buffalo story, Sam,” her mom was saying with a slight laugh.

“Oh yeah, that’s a good one,” he chuckled, before turning towards Kim. “So if you’ll believe this, kiddo, way back when the town was first started, there were still huge herds of buffalo living here. Right where we are now.” 

“Really?” Kim gasped.

“Really. And one year, on the Fourth of July, that herd came stampeding through the middle of town – right through all those crowds and celebrations. Can you guess why?”

Kim scrunched up her face as she used all six years of knowledge and life experiences to form a conclusion. Finally, she blurted out, “The fireworks!”

“Exactly!” He clapped his hands. “Some _really smart_ person decided to set off fireworks right in the middle of the plains, and they ended up setting off the buffalo instead. Pretty neat, huh?” He chuckled then, a fondness drifting across his face as if he had been there himself. “The government was so angry at having their new settlement trampled to death. I mean, they barely even got it in the first place.” 

“Why?” Kim asked curiously.

“Okay, you know what? I think it’s time for a history lesson,” her dad replied, and Kim leaned back as he launched into a rambling story about the founding of Red Cloud - how according to local legend, the town had been named after an Indian chief who waged a war against the U.S. government and won. “He was a truly amazing leader, and he stood up for his people against a really powerful enemy. The respect that we have for Chief Red Cloud means he got a whole town named after him.”

“He sounds very brave,” Kim piped up.

Her dad gave her a small smile. “Yeah, kiddo. He was.” Then he patted her on the shoulder. “His daughter’s grave is down by the river. I’ll take you sometime – we can bring flowers for both of them.” 

Kim straightened up. “Can we bring daisies? Or – or maybe roses?”

He grinned down at her. “Sure. Why not both?”

Then they fell into an easy silence again, waiting for darkness to fall. Kim ran her hand through the grass, relishing in the scratchy stiffness against her palm, as around her the air stood still, broken only by the quiet buzzing of evening flies and her dad’s slightly-in-tune rendition of “America the Beautiful”. _“O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain…for purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain…”_

And then suddenly:

“Oh, there they go,” her mom called out, as the distinctive whistling of fireworks arced over the dark plains.

Kim drew herself closer to her parents, as the fireworks sent up bright flares over the quiet plains. She watched them shatter across the darkness. Trails of neon green. Explosions of carmine and gold. Shrieks of alabaster white against the denim sky. 

_“America, America, God mend thine every flaw...confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law…”_

That evening, Kim burns her hot dogs on the stove. She tucks the blackened sausages into stale buns and steps out onto the balcony overlooking Main Street, tipping her head to look towards the shattering sky. And she thinks, Fourth of July is the only time of year that Red Cloud really comes alive, the crackling of fireworks cut periodically by the cheers of her neighbors and the crunching of gravel as kids run along the streets with their plastic flags. 

She imagines stripping the streets away and seeing once again the buffalo that run headlong into the wind, across open prairies, underneath the asymptotic blue sky. She thinks about Chief Red Cloud, preparing for battle against an unyielding line of soldiers across the river. How he and his daughter’s story had been reduced to two paragraphs in a history textbook and an annual performance put on by Red Cloud High’s theater group – how the students had turned someone’s death into a celebration of something that wasn’t even theirs.

In the morning, when Kim steps out into the streets again, the buildings are dead and decrepit once more. Everywhere she looks, there’s boarded-up windows, cracked wood against red brick. Endless red brick, all the way down deserted streets. A fine mist of aeolian dust drifting in the weak sunlight. She blinks it out of her eyes but it still lingers before her, glittering. 

The town has changed so much since she last looked. Those vendors that had once dominated the streets had slowly left over the years, one by one, until all that was left was a pile of tables toppled over the lawn of the public library, and red and blue streamers tangled in the rusting railroad tracks leading out of town.

And all that remains of the fireworks that had sparked up the sky last night is the faintest smell of smoke, something unnatural, something stinging, and patches of burned grass in the fields leading out to nowhere. 

* * *

Everything had changed the summer before Kim’s junior year of high school.

A pair of sunglasses swiped from the school’s lost-and-found bins. The KC Royals baseball cap her dad had gotten her for Christmas one year. A set of faded pink jeans and a white T-shirt sporting the name of a band she’d never even heard of before she’d waded into the discount aisle of Goodwill. Hair snapped back into a low ponytail.

All that, and nobody was able to recognize the girl who sat with her cello at the corner of Webster and 4th.

She’d tried different places before – even catching a ride up to Hastings before realizing that nobody was going to listen to her play if they could attend the impromptu Kool-Aid festival happening down the street instead. Eventually she decided to set up in Red Cloud, at the most popular intersection downtown, hoping to make good use of any summer tourists passing by.

She sat down at the curb and pinned her sheet music to the ground with a rock; the paper flapped idly against her ankle.

She played for what felt like hours, working through a cluster of sonatas and concertos, as the strings quivered beneath her bow, humming like heat waves – and then she dove into an assortment of shorter pieces – melodies that her dad had heard in passing and bartered, no doubt, from the school music teacher. It wasn’t until she played through the entirety of _Liebestraum No. 3,_ drawing out the last note to hang, golden, in the air, that she noticed a man had stopped to listen. She released the neck of the cello, fingers throbbing from pressing down on the strings for so long, and tipped the instrument back until it was leaning against her shoulder. The man watching offered her a warm smile.

“That was lovely,” he said, pulling out his wallet and producing a twenty dollar bill. It wasn’t until the movement shifted his suit jacket that she noticed the badge gleaming on his chest, proclaiming his status as a member of the Willa Cather Foundation. 

So someone from out of town, then, who had come by to see what his investments were doing to revitalize a town that had been slowly crumbling for decades. Kim clenched her fist tightly around her bow, shut her eyes for a brief moment. The sunlight was blocked out to a muted red against her eyelids, and yet the pity radiating from the man in front of her remained blinding. 

The shoulder of her cello burned against her skin.

When she opened her eyes again, the man was still there, waiting expectantly, hand extended with the money. “So what was that? Schubert? Chopin?” 

She leaned over and picked up the sheet music, shaking off the light layer of dust that had settled over the pages before holding it out to him. “Neither.”

He squinted down at the fine print. “Ah, right, yes. _Liebestraum_ by Liszt _._ That means… _Love Dream,_ doesn’t it?” And at Kim’s silence, he continued: “I honestly didn’t know it was transcribed for cello.”

Kim forced her lips into a thin smile, before setting the music down by her feet again. “Well, I guess it was.”

He considered her for a few more moments. And then an ugly shadow began creeping over his face, and it took Kim only a matter of seconds to recognize it as pity. “In any case, please” – he waves the money in his hand – “take this, Miss…may I have your name?”

She thought about giving a fake name, something fancy like Penelope or Giselle or Genevieve - names that didn’t belong to her but were instead given to people born into money, people who attend crowded concert halls and throw about the names of famous composers like flower petals at a wedding.

People who didn’t need to sit next to the gutter on a Tuesday afternoon, brick street burning through the thin soles of their shoes, playing a slightly out-of-tune cello all so they could buy next week’s household groceries.

She reached over to take the bill and crumpled it in her fist. “Kim Wexler.” Her name sat heavy on her tongue. 

“Do you play out here often, Miss Wexler?”

Her mom staring over a mug of cold coffee, as she asked her daughter to _beg,_ to take the burning inside of her and fold it away like dirty clothes. Because after all, Kim wanted the money, didn’t she? She needed it, and she had the means of getting it. It was selfish of her _not_ to be out on the streets.

Kim clenched her jaw until her teeth ached. “No. I – I’m just here to prove a point.”

That evening, Kim tossed her earnings onto the kitchen table. It’s funny, she thought, that of all the things her mom had done, this was what finally spurred her into movement.

That evening, she packed her things, hoisted the straps of her cello case over her shoulder, and burst out into the brooding night, the blood thundering in her ears. A warning tune. _This can’t be all there is. You need more. You need more than this._

* * *

The winter of 1983 arrives with less snow than usual, and by the week before Christmas, there’s barely an inch covering the ground. Kim spends her morning at Kearney State College, then drives back down to Casey’s for her afternoon shift. In between ringing up customers, she amuses herself by watching the live TV broadcast of Nebraska’s first female governor-elect formally accepting her position. 

Kim imagines the governor returning to her white mansion, thinks about her sipping rosehip tea and searching through a polished ivory chest for tomorrow’s matching set of pearl necklace and earrings. She thinks about the governor driving up to her new shiny office in Lincoln, skimming right past small towns like Red Cloud and Blue Hill, where her constituents lived with holes in their pockets. Where a child stuck between two parents - three dollar movie tickets scrunched in her dirt-bruised fist, second-hand cello by her side - looks on. 

She steps out to take a short break, and Liam is waiting there, leaning against the passenger door of his car, a cigarette between his lips. “Hey,” he greets her. “How’s work?” 

She extends her hand and with a slight eyebrow raise, he holds out his pack of cigarettes, flicking open the lighter with his other hand. Kim peels a cigarette from the pack, balances the tip over the blue flame, and watches it ignite. Then she leans away, bringing the cigarette to her mouth and taking a slow drag. 

The caustic smoke sears her airway going down, but Kim holds in her cough, like she holds in everything else. Eyes watering, head spinning, a strange warmth spreading through her core, she barely remembers to exhale. The smoke billows out in front of her, blue against the sunset-tinted snow. 

“Work’s pretty slow, as usual,” she says. 

Liam is watching her, mildly impressed. He lays a warm hand on her arm. “Not bad for your first smoke.” 

“Thanks, but I don’t need your approval,” Kim points out.

He raises both hands in a gesture of surrender. “Yeah, of course.” Then he shifts, crossing both arms and dipping his head to stare at the ground. He clears his throat. “So, about that holiday party - ”

“I can’t, Liam. It’s not really my thing.” 

“Why not? It’s free - I mean, grad students get free entrance, and I could take you as my date.” 

“As your date, huh?” 

His grin fades instantly at her question. “Just a thought.” 

She crosses her arms. “I _can’t._ Sorry. I’m just busy.” 

He nods, a quick motion in response to her clipped words. “Alright, let’s forget that then.” After a few moments of silence, he says, “You know, I won’t be in town for a lot longer. I mean, I’ve got job offers lined up after graduation.” 

“I know.” 

He clears his throat again. “Well, I mean, I don’t know exactly how to say this, but...I was hoping you’d come with me.” 

“Come with you?” She laughs crisply, breath opaque in the cold air. “And, what, live together somewhere off in New York? Hollywood?” 

“Maybe,” he shrugs. “Can’t really imagine starting a screenwriting career anywhere else, can you? And it’ll be a fresh start for you, so that’s a plus.” 

“You know my answer, Liam.” 

He looks around, then leans toward her. “Okay, you know what, can I just – can I just be frank with you here?” 

“Always.”

“How do you even see us together, Kim? Like, why’d you even agree to go out with me if it’s just gonna be like this?” 

There’s a lot of things she could say. He has a nice TV. He is kind and considerate on most days. He is new, someone untainted by the tallgrass prairies where her tender bruises took root, someone she thought would help put her at ease and tell her things would be okay. 

She supposes that mostly, he just has a nice TV - flat-screen, silver at the edges. Something he’d bought with his parent’s money. 

There’s a lot of things she could say. But today, the new governor has been elected and there’s a juice spill inside she still has to clean up and she has an exam in three days that she’s just barely begun preparing for, so Kim doesn’t say anything, just raises the cigarette to her lips again, and watches the lit end glow against the darkness of the trees beyond. Watches the smoke twist lazily upwards and disappear into the fragile sunset.

She holds back words like lemons in her mouth. She’s been holding back words her entire life.

“Kim?” There’s anger in his voice now. His eyes are sharp like flint in the simmering light.

She flicks ash off the end of her cigarette, watching as it smolders in the snow. “Don’t make me answer that, Liam.” 

“Fine.” He throws his arms up again. “I mean, I just feel like aside from me catching you here, we barely see each other.” He takes a breath. “Can we at least do something after your shift?” 

“I don’t know, depends on the offer.” 

“Well, let’s see - there’s bowling, putting up graffiti, skinny dipping down by that blown sludge you call a river.”

“Putting up graffiti – Liam, how old do you _think_ we are?”

“What, like there’s anything else we could do in this shitty town?” His eyes narrow. “What can I do to get you to live a little, Kim?”

And maybe it’s the fact that he was raised as a rich kid from the East Coast, someone who dons polished winter boots and a slick brown trench coat and Christmas-patterned suspenders, or maybe it’s the fact that he keeps running his hand through his stupid, stupid gelled-up hair, or maybe it’s because now he seems so out of place in her small, dusty town with his clothes and his college degree and his alabaster smile - she can feel a keen frustration burning her throat, because he doesn’t get it, he’s never gotten it, he’s never even tried, and he has no right to _criticize -_

“I found my own place yesterday.” She didn’t.

She lets him shift in his discomfort for a few more seconds before elaborating. “I can get all my stuff moved there this weekend.” 

“Your own place.” Liam drops his used cigarette into the snow and crushes it beneath his boot. He doesn’t look back at her. “And how are you gonna afford that?” 

“I’ll manage,” Kim retorts. “I’ll find roommates, and I’m up for a raise next week.” She is _so far_ from qualifying for her next raise, but she is past caring. 

He sighs, long and drawn-out, as if talking to her is tiring. “I guess it’s useless to say that I love you?”

She shoots him a look that she hopes conveys what she intends. _You don’t. You don’t know me at all._

“Okay.” He swivels toward her for one last piercing affirmation. “Okay. So this is it then?” 

And the answer comes to her as easily as thunderheads roll in from the eastern horizon. “Yeah. This is it.” And, as an afterthought: “Um, I wish you all the best with your career.” 

His mouth twists into a thin line. “Okay. Merry early Christmas, I guess, if I don’t see you before then.”

She heads back inside after Liam’s car screeches out of the parking lot. As she continues to ring up stragglers, she notices that the clock on the wall has broken. The second hand jerks periodically, but remains permanently fixed at the five o’clock position.

The last customer leaves, and as the glass door swings open, briefly warping the light from outside, she can see the December sun, unapologetically orange against the watery sky. She glances up at the dust congealed at the corners of the glass, and the hairline cracks spidering over the walls. The entire building is getting older. And she’s getting older too, her frustration growing a body of its own. 

Her eyes are burning. She swipes at them furiously with her sleeve.

And the radio is still playing the same song, one of those Top 40 hits that her mom might have played in the car once, back when they still had one. The chords fall like paperweights in front of her. 

_Baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time..._

* * *

She is in the middle of writing a letter addressed to the Omaha Correctional Center when she gets the call.

The fog rolls in thick over the plains, silencing the snow-streaked grass and stifling the sunrise, and through the hushed morning her phone rings, a sharp sound as if cracking through permafrost. 

* * *

Kim pulls up beside the prison, peers through the hazy snow towards that concrete fortress with the corrugated red roofs.

The last time she’d been inside those walls had been several years ago, a hasty decision she’d made after her talk with Lynette. She had brought her copy of To Kill A Mockingbird, and he had stared at her from across the interrogation table like she was a ghost, swept in by the delirious winter chill. 

She broke through the silence with a question. “Why didn’t you call me from inside, Dad?” 

He startled slightly, as if just remembering he wasn’t alone anymore. “Oh, sweetheart, it’s…it’s complicated.”

She took a deep breath. Her heart pounded painfully against her ribs. “Well, if you don’t want an update, I can leave.” 

“No, no, please.” His voice softened. “Please stay.”

They lapsed into silence before Kim let it all spill - how she had quit orchestra halfway through high school, how their favorite drive-in theater was on the brink of closing, how she was restless and hungry and how the town just kept infusing her with a mean sluggishness, carving into her resolve to do something, _anything_ \- how she just wanted to dig out the dirt from between her ribs – 

And her dad just nodded through it all, fixing her with the kind stare she had missed, as if they still knew each other, as if he had never left.

When she was done, she laid both hands on the table, feeling the stiff edge of her legal pad brush against her thumb. 

“Would you have answered if I did call?” he asked finally. 

The answer left her in a quick gasp. “Of course, _of course_. You’re my dad.”

He looked out the window as if the snow was suddenly very interesting, drifting quietly down from the slate-gray clouds and rolling over the landscape in white waves. She noticed the new shock of gray in his hair too, as if a little bit of those prison bars had rubbed off on him permanently.

“I hate that I can’t be there for you, kiddo. Every day I’ve been in here…” He removed his glasses and swiped a hand across his face, and Kim swiftly looked away. She could hear his voice trembling, water about to fall from a leaf. “But what’s done is done, yeah?”

“Dad, I could have _helped._ The sentence they gave you was way too long, I could – I can still talk to your lawyer, maybe we can – ”

A smile, cracking across his face like porcelain. “Oh, Kim. You don’t need to be my Atticus Finch. You’re gonna move on, okay? You’ll be fine.”

“But – ”

“Don’t worry about me, okay? You’ve got your own life to live now.”

He reached over the cold table, handcuffs scraping against the wood, and asked, “Can I see the book?” When she nodded, he took the book and, unclipping the pen from her binder, wrote something on the inner cover. 

Kim accepted the book back and glanced down at the message with a weary smile. “Dad, you know this is from the library, right?” 

“Doesn’t make what I wrote any less true,” he said, rolling the pen back towards her, and for a moment she was a child again, sitting in his lap and giggling at one of his jokes. 

Then he sighed. “I miss hearing you play, Kim. And I just wish I could’ve, you know…learned piano or something. To play accompaniment for you.”

“Dad, you know as well as I do that the only piano in town – in that one hotel – was practically rotting from old age.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just one regret of mine, that’s all.” His breath hitched then, a short strangled sound. “I missed you so much, kiddo. I’m so glad you’re here.” 

And the lights seemed to blaze brighter all of a sudden. The faint buzzing of the fluorescent bulbs crescendoed to an eerie hum – faster, faster – and something collapsed in her throat, settling heavily in her chest.

“Dad, I just keep thinking...” 

The plan had always been simple, ingrained in Kim’s mind ever since she first heard her parents argue, ever since she first realized that no matter how many times she washed her hands after playing outside, the pulpy dirt would always follow her, would always stain her palms. Get enough money, and they could finally leave town. And as long as they moved somewhere else, they would come together like pieces of a broken plate and mend themselves. Become whole again.

And now they never would, because somewhere inside that prison is her dad’s body, a Y-shaped scar running down his torso from the autopsy, a white sheet pulled over his body. They had prepared her over the phone but still she hesitates to go inside. Instead, she dreams of something that should have happened. Her dad stepping into the snow, no longer wearing his prison uniform. Hair tidy. Glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. An ecstatic smile on his pale face as he turns toward the parking lot where his ride awaits, toward freedom and the future, toward the sunlight coasting over the horizon.

The funeral is small and subdued: just Kim, a couple of local businessowners, and three of his former students. As they stand around the headstone, the snow flurries around them, sinking through their sweaters and coating the worn-down rock like fine rosin powder.

“Hey, you wanna catch a ride back home with us?” Someone’s hand is on her shoulder, a warm weight tipping onto her skin like uneven brass scales.

She opens her eyes and stares at the flat road lying just beyond the cemetery, scarred with snowy tire tracks and framed by trees, bowing, dripping with icicles - and somewhere beyond that road, the sharp line of a distant mountain range, thin and blue like the edge of a contact lens, separating the earth from an impenetrable gray sky.

The small crowd is dispersing around her. She throws her head back and catches an icy gust of wind. In the distance, a woman is humming a broken tune, soft and mournful. It sounds like a nocturne, maybe, something drifting to her from the dark. Something she had played once in a dimly-lit Blue Hill apartment, the crescendos swelling in sharp waves. It sounded like gasping for air. It sounded like too much, too much, _too much –_ followed by emptiness.

“Kim, you wanna come with us to Cutter’s? We can get breakfast for dinner, what do you say?”

It’s odd that she isn’t crying. Instead, she just focuses on breathing, and the air comes in spirals, in circles. The song wavers, reedy and uncertain. A string plucked to its breaking point. 

“Kim, you coming?”

 _This can’t go on,_ Kim thinks, even as she turns to follow them. _This can’t go on._

* * *

The next day, Kim wakes up early, puts on her nicest sweater and her cleanest pair of jeans, and walks over to the State Theater. Dust floats down from the ceiling as she pries open the front door, crusted shut with ice, and the dust continues to cling to her as she, tracking snow with each footstep, makes her way down an increasingly constricted hallway, and then around a sharp corner where she finds the public defender’s office, small and unassuming. 

He opens the door at the third knock, wearing a gray robe and holding a piece of burnt toast and looking shocked to see an actual person standing before him on a Friday morning. It takes him a few seconds to recognize her after ten years. “Miss Wexler. What are you doing here? Oh – ” He gestures at himself sheepishly. “Please, uh – I apologize for this. I don’t get many visitors.” 

A cursory glance through the open door reveals the entropic living situation of someone with improper work-life balance. The first thing she notices is the shabby desk, overflowing with manila envelopes and loose sheets of paper that nearly obscure the small placard reading _Albert St. Claire, Esq._ A few feet away, below the dust-smeared window, lies a toaster oven, still smoking suspiciously. A crack in the floorboard appears from beneath the device and branches out to the right, vanishing under the sofa slowly shedding fluff into the air. A pair of white slippers teeters haphazardly on the arm of the sofa, and a rumpled suit and tie have been tossed half-folded on the seat. Further up the wall, a small phone is mounted, curly wires tangled in a mass. Several Post-it notes are plastered beneath it, small splotches of color against the drywall – _Call Diana w/ plea deal. Meet Matt 10:30. Bank closed, cash check on TUES idiot._

It looks more like home than any place she’s ever known.

“I like the new office,” she says simply. 

He offers her a weak smile. “Yeah, well, I got it for free. Think the last guy got tired of the spiders.” He straightens up. “I’m sorry to hear about your dad. For what it’s worth, every time I went in there to check on him, he would always talk about you.”

She feels for the hard edges of the book resting in her bag, thinks about the blue-inked message swirling across the inner cover. _I love you, kiddo. Go show them how it’s done._

“I have a question for you, Mr. St. Claire.” 

“Sure, yeah, anything.” 

She takes a deep breath, stuffs her hands deep inside her pockets.

“I was wondering if you’re looking for someone to help with any of your cases?” 

* * *

Every spring, the warm wind would sweep along the banks of the Republican River, heralding the arrival of the sandhill cranes. As a child, Kim had gone down to the river with her mom to watch them fly by each year, webbed feet dragging across the surface of the water, black-tipped wings extended gracefully as they landed in the mud to forage for a few days, gathering strength to continue their journey upwards to central Nebraska then all the way up north to the arctic. 

One year, the cranes came late. As the two of them hiked their way to the river, shrunken by drought, the air empty and throbbing with the absence of the cranes’ stuttering calls, Kim noticed something moving through the parched grass framing the riverbank. She took a closer look and saw a young bird hobbling towards the brown water. It was covered in white and russet-colored down, matted with dirt all over, and stood upon trembling pink legs. As she watched, the chick lifted its head, stretching out its slender neck, and let loose a series of confused clicks. 

“Your dad’s late again,” Chloe Wexler groaned, setting down the wicker basket full of store-bought crackers and fruit. “Jesus, if you’re gonna plan a picnic, at least be on time.” 

“He promised he would come,” Kim replied, continuing to observe the wandering chick. 

Her mom followed her gaze and sighed, clicking her tongue against her teeth. “C’mon, Kim. We’ll find a nice spot to sit down and set up.” 

“But – ” Kim blurted out, pointing at the chick. “It looks lost! We have to help it, Mom.” 

“He’s not lost, honey. The parents will come back to look for him.” 

“How do you know?” Kim protested. 

“They will, okay?” Her mom slipped a hand onto Kim’s shoulder. “I’m sure the parents are just finding food or something.” 

Kim glanced up once again at the empty skies. “Maybe we should take it home – ” she began, but was interrupted by a stern look from her mom. 

“We are _not_ bringing it back with us, Kim. I mean it. If the parents want him back, they’ll come find him.”

The following day, Kim left school during the lunch break, making her way back to the river, half-hoping that the sandhill crane chick wouldn’t be there. She found it sitting in the grass near the cracked mud, head drooping, as if in acceptance. But upon sensing her presence, the chick unfolded its legs and adjusted its stumpy wings. Kim noticed a new streak of blood along its delicate arm bone.

Kim reached into her pocket and pulled out several crackers she had swiped from the picnic. She crumbled them, then held her hand out to the chick, who crooked its neck, glancing up at her curiously. 

“Come on,” she pleaded with it. The bird blinked, royal blue irises briefly covered by translucent eyelids, before dipping its head and resuming its lonely search for food in the dirt.

And then suddenly, the air crackled with the wingbeats of incoming birds. Kim glanced skywards and saw a massive flock of cranes descending towards the river. The water rippled in their wake as they touched down, sifting through the wet silt with their webbed feet. Their great trumpeting calls echoed through the dry clearing as they shuffled amongst themselves, recovering after a long journey, blotting out the entire riverbed with white and gray plumage. 

Kim waited for hours - waited for some crane to raise its neck above the crowd and catch sight of the bloodied chick sitting at her feet. Waited for that crane to come swooping over, to lean down and nuzzle its offspring gently, crooning with sympathy. Waited for some form of justice before she even knew what justice was.

But none of the cranes acknowledged their presence. And eventually, as if obeying a central command, they lifted off into the air again, unfurling their long wings and riding upwards on the warm current. Kim watched as one by one, the last of the cranes took flight, and the entire flock grew smaller and smaller, thousands of dark silhouettes swirling like leaves against the pale blue sky.

And it was only then that the chick unhinged its small beak and made a gurgling plea to its departing kin. And Kim was only able to sit back and listen to the plaintive cries of the young bird as it arched its neck desperately, suddenly overtaken by panic. It struggled for a horrifying moment to take flight, but tumbled back down into the dirt, all fragile bones and soft feathers and bulging eyes. Through the chaos, the wounded wing began to bleed in earnest.

An ache rising in her chest, Kim scattered the handful of cracker crumbs in a semicircle by the chick’s side. Then she rocked back on her heels, a solemn spectator, as it kept singing its mournful song, resting against the gaping mouth of the _fermata,_ reaching for a comfort that would not return. 

* * *

The Willa Cather Foundation continues to reach out across the United States, reeling in tourists eager to visit the famous literary town and establishing a steady stream of revenue into Nebraska. Small business owners begin to move into the once-abandoned shops along Main Street. The seasons continue to turn, the railroad continues to rust, and the years continue to fall away. 

And Kim continues to draw up her plan.

She snags a map from City Hall and hangs it on the wall above her bed. She traces along the highway that would take her out of Red Cloud, out of Nebraska. She follows the latitude lines, traversing mountains and river valleys and stoic forests until she ends up way out in the west, in the vast and gleaming desert that swallows up the sun. She thinks of Liam and wonders how he’s doing in California, if he’s raking in the big bucks like he had always wanted. 

Kim spends her days down at the courthouse, observing intently as Albert St. Claire defends all manner of clients - petty thieves, the homeless man caught lifting expired bread from the dump, people who woke up in the drunk tank one time too many. She helps him draft closing statements, follow up with witnesses, and rehearse questions with shell-shocked defendants.

And then one day, he lays in front of her a sheet of paper detailing hundreds of law offices west of Nebraska that she could work for instead. “Here’s what I got for you.” 

Kim gives the list a quick once-over, tracing over the print. “Thanks Al.” She glances up at him. “I really appreciate the chance you gave me here. I’m sorry I won’t be staying.” 

He winks at her. “I figured as much. I mean, you aren’t gonna be my paralegal forever.” 

Then, as she continues skimming over the list, he suddenly asks, “You ever thought about joining a larger law firm? There’s several on that list. I’ve marked them in red.” 

She shrugs. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve never worked for one before, I don’t know what it’s like.” 

“A young professional like you would get a lot of support there. I mean, you’d have to put your head down, do the work they ask you to do. But you wouldn’t be obligated to stay forever. You could get out, use their connections to start your own office sometime. Maybe find a partner who’s willing to play the long game with you.” 

“I don’t know,” she repeats, touching the glossy paper, still warm from the printer. “I guess, I never really thought about working in a firm.”

“Take my word for it, Kim. It’ll help you get a jump start on your career. You do not want to run out of options and be forced into this public defender stint – as rewarding as it can be sometimes.”

A smile tugs at the corner of her lip. “Well, no offense, Al, but my whole life I’ve been doing what other people have said would be best for me. I just want to make some decisions for myself.”

“Okay, fair enough.” The corners of his eyes crinkle as he returns her a warm smile. “Just…think about it.”

She studies him for a long time, his aging face, his graying hair, the tiredness that seems permanently etched into his skin by a thankless job with long hours and low pay. She asks, “Why haven’t you left Red Cloud yet? I’m sure you could find a position anywhere else but here.” 

Now it’s his turn to shrug. “I’ve still got a lot of things to do here. But you – you’ve spent enough time here to last a lifetime, haven’t you?”

So armed with her list of potential employers and her strengthening resolve, Kim plays her final card the afternoon of her twenty-fifth birthday. 

Her mom, lying on her back on the couch, stirs slightly when Kim walks into the kitchen of their old apartment.

The years haven’t been kind to Chloe Wexler. There are harsh lines around her mouth, and a drop of blood glistens at the corner of her lip where the skin has cracked. As she drags herself to a sitting position, her hair falls back from her shoulders, revealing gray at the temples. 

“Kim, is that you?” she asks, voice hoarse from disuse. Her eyes are eerily bright, almost glassy in the harsh light that claws through the window.

One more thing to do. “Yeah, Mom. It’s me.” 

Her mom sighs. “Jesus, Kim. What’s it been – five years since you moved out, and not a single word from you? I had to find out how you’re doing from your boss and, even worse, the town librarian?” 

And Kim steels herself, straightens up, feels the crescendo of dissonant memories in her throat. Watching money slowly burn over the stove. Leaving behind a helpless chick to die on the riverbank. Drinking her coffee bitter because that’s the way Mom likes it, and Mom knows everything, doesn’t she?

And like a songbird perched atop gleaming power lines, she prepares to step off into thin air.

* * *

She digs out her old binder, now crusted with dust, from the cello case and smooths out the wrinkled pages of her sheet music. She traces over the fading highlighter marks, the exclamation points drawn immediately after the title _Vocalise,_ the thready pencil annotations. The music articulations startle her like black thorns cutting through snow. _Morendo._ Slowly dying. She should’ve known from the start it would be her, and her alone, who would make it out west alive.

And her mom’s parting words had fallen before her like cut flowers, bleeding into the hardwood. _You haven’t even been here the last few years, you – you think I actually care if you go? Just go, get the fuck out of town, if that’s what you want!_

 _Fine, Mom,_ she had said, crossing her arms to hide the trembling of her hands. _Just…I know when to walk away now. I do._

She crumples the sheet music, the crisp pages crunching in her fist like bones.

She brings her cello to an old collector who had recently opened up his music store in Blue Hill; he examines the instrument carefully and tells her it’s worth at least five hundred bucks. It’s all she needs. She cashes in her dad’s pride and joy for a one-way ticket out of Nebraska. So in a way, Kim thinks, as she rests her head against the window of the plane, watching the copper and coffee-stained stretch of New Mexico slowly coming into view, unfurling into neat square neighborhoods beneath a clarion blue sky - it really was music that had delivered her in the end.

She walks into Albuquerque alone. And in the shadow of the Sandias, she carves out a place for herself in the public library down the street, warm and clean. She takes armfuls of books back to her apartment, where she devours them over a glass of cheap wine - the bottle had been left unopened for her by the landlord who looks at her with infuriating pity, who looks at her and only sees an overly-ambitious woman in her late 20’s with no family, no friends, and no partner. 

And all the while, the same anthem keeps up a constant hum in her ears. _Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law..._

Over the next five years, she spends her nights drowning herself in legal terms and landmark cases. The momentum carries her into a stuffy college classroom to take the LSAT, and then into more classrooms at the UNM School of Law filled with other bright and hungry students, and then into the vast, gleaming offices of Hamlin Hamlin & McGill, where she meets the law partners who would be paying for the rest of her education. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she regrets accepting a debt of this magnitude. She resolves to pay back every single penny. 

She stares at those alabaster walls, untouched by dirt or dust or shattered beer bottles, while Howard Hamlin talks to her about their expectations. Then she has time to wander around the building while they finalize the hiring process. She starts off at the fifth-floor conference room, then walks down that blue and gold stairwell, stopping by the third floor to greet some fellow law students, then continues even further down, past the lobby - all the way to the basement, where the mailroom lies waiting, and where she encounters a man in a striped short-sleeve and hastily-knotted tie, a shock of brown hair flopping over his forehead as he tries to wrestle a fresh ream of paper into the grumbling copier one-armed. He yanks at the paper tray fruitlessly. “Jesus, what - Ernie, can you give me a hand here? It’s stuck again!” And with a theatrical groan, he bursts out for the entire world to hear, “Guess third time’s _not_ the charm after all!” 

It isn’t until later, when he comes up to her with a winning smile and an apology for having to witness his earlier technology-induced breakdown, that she officially meets Jimmy McGill. 

**Author's Note:**

> For those who are interested in Red Cloud history, there’s a lot more interesting information on the Walk Red Cloud website if you would like to check it out! I also ended up fudging the dates on when Nebraska’s first female governor was elected, because the timeline was just not working out :)
> 
> Classical music referenced:  
> Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14 by Sergei Rachmaninoff  
> Liebestraum No. 3 by Franz Liszt  
> Schwanengesang D. 957 No. 4 Ständchen by Franz Schubert (I had this in mind for the song Kim hears at the funeral)


End file.
